Wittgenstein’s Verificationism

The paper explores Wittgenstein’s discourse of 1929-1930 concerning the problem of verification in respect of both its textual sources and its significance. I first discuss the most important interpretations of the issue and then analyze Wittgenstein’s notes from that period along with his conversations with Schlick and Waismann. The results of the analysis imply that the empirical sense of verification intertwines with its grammatical sense. On the one hand, the question of verification appears in the context of phenomenology and so-called phenomenological language, referring to immediate experience; on the other hand, it is conceived of as a means of settling the sense of a sentence, or, which amounts to the same thing, of fixing the available uses of a sentence. Such an ambiguity is characteristic of the middle, transitory period of Wittgenstein’s philosophical development.